watching

Thirteen crows. A murder. The child counts them from the tucked-away Manhattan park rhimed in ice and soiled snow that (two days after it first fell) is lamentably far from virgin. The boy is wrapped in a scarf and his parka while his mother walks the aged and limping German Shepherd; the chill vivifies it, and the animal snaps its jaws at dirty white slush. Her hands are full with its leash, and she doesn't see her mesmerized child watching the crows, who watch him back.

Later, the boy dreams in violet, in pure and electric washes of vibrant color like the gleam from a perfect amythest struck by sunlight.

But in the park, they perch on the branches of a warped bare oak, all of them facing the same direction as if they share common eyes. When they take off again (in a single mass, a shuddering strike of synchronous wingbeats that cause the woman and the dog to look up; the air trembles with a near-seismic quail that prompts the dog to whine and her to shiver under layers of warm fabric and perfume), the birds follow the mercury trail of a silver Mercedes Benz just then speeding past.

Later, they hunch over the telephone wires near this rundown hotel or that townhouse. They are a feathered shadow mass, occasionally sending their raucous voices into the air. It's a sound like rust or an old wound, and it's hard to tell whether they might have once sung beautifully. The disconcerted hearer jerks awake in a cold sweat after night falls, with a strange understanding of something terrible haunting the mind's fringes, something too oceanic vast to comprehend awake, and there's relief when the razored edges of the dream finally fades with daylight.

Thirteen crows. They watch (watch over) the precious Twelfth; the two; and the First out of Eleven, One plus Ten.

They are warm in the winter freeze, smelling like jasmine and rust mingled with December sunlight.